Dr. Marie Polley is Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Social Prescribing Network and past Chair of the British Society for Integrative Oncology, Director of Marie Polley Consultancy, and Co-Director of Meaningful Measures Ltd 

Marie trained as a biomedical scientist and has a Ph.D. in molecular carcinogenesis of lung cancer.  Marie also trained in Reiki whilst completing her Ph.D. and practiced as a Reiki Master for many years.

For the past 20 years, Marie has researched approaches to integrating different paradigms of health and wellbeing focussing on integrative oncology for many years.  Marie collaborated to develop Measure Yourself Concerns and Wellbeing (MYCaW), a person-centered tool for understanding people’s primary concerns. This tool is now accredited for use in the NHS for personalised care used internationally in integrative oncology to enable a persons' voice to be incorporated into their consultations. 

More recently Marie co-founded the Social Prescribing Network, which has led a social movement around the use of non-medical activities to support people’s wider determinants of health and provide additional routes of support to traditional pharmaceutical prescribing.  Social Prescribing has now been adopted by the NHS in England and has become an international movement for change. Marie led the team to write the first national guidance, the first economic overview of social prescribing on health service usage and recently mapped all outcomes associated with social prescribing to support discussion on inclusive ways of researching and evaluating this growing field. Marie provides advice to senior leaders, Members of Parliament and the House of Lords, key stakeholders and researchers in this field.